The Keys to the Kingdom

By Kim Masters

Writing about The Keys to the Kingdom has put this reviewer in a curious predicament.

The book deserves recommendation because it's a great read--fun, juicy, compelling drama built from the real-life machinations of some of Hollywood's most powerful men. But it can't really be trusted, because it's got a few factual errors that call the entire volume's reliability into question.

So do I suggest that you read the book, knowing that you can't necessarily trust what you're reading? Or do I suggest that you avoid the book, thereby depriving yourself of the fun in reading about the behind-the-scenes exploits of the rich and famous?

That's a tough call, but I'm gonna err on the side of good reading and say that Keys is worth picking up--if you can suspend your desire to wholeheartedly embrace every detail of Kim Masters' story, and accept that when even the smallest facts are skewed, you can't necessarily buy into the whole.

Masters' errors in the book are tiny, to be sure. She calls popular non-Disney cartoon character Arthur a "mouse," when he's actually an aardvark. She claims that Disney never did a cartoon series based on the Marsupilami character, when in actuality, they did. But when you notice small errors like this, they shatter the book's credibility, just as a jarring chapter in a work of fiction might shatter any suspension of disbelief. When you're eagerly reading about the filthy little secrets of powerful men, you want to trust every word. They're such delicious words. You don't want a bad taste in your mouth after devouring them. Sadly, these tiny mistakes create that bad taste.

Other than that, it's a great book, although it should be pointed out that its subtitle--"How Michael Eisner Lost His Grip"--suggests that the book focuses solely on Eisner, when it's really the story of his career in movies and his complex relationships with other executives he's been closely associated with. As the supporting players arrive on the scene--Barry Diller, Frank Wells, Jeffrey Katzenberg--their stories are picked up as well, with an amazing attention to detail.

In fact, eventually Eisner becomes the least-developed figure in the book, probably thanks to the fact that he refused to cooperate with Masters and was never interviewed specifically for this project. You get a much stronger sense of who the other major players are than who Eisner is. He's the mercurial, somewhat mysterious figure at the center of all of the action, and the others are fully-developed, complex characters.

Wells and Katzenberg, Eisner's two chief lieutenants during Disney's salad years of the late eighties and early nineties, emerge as especially strong forces in the book's story. Masters creates a palpable sense of the chemistry at work between the three executives--Katzenberg the fierce production exec who yearned on some level for Eisner's approval but never recieved it, and Wells the eternal peacekeeper, who always knew how to keep Eisner in check and preserve Disney's corporate image. It's no surprise that upon Wells' untimely death in 1994, the magic that seemed to charm the executive level at Disney faded quickly away, with Eisner and Katzenberg eventually locked in an acrimony-drenched lawsuit over the small matter of an ignored bonus--one that eventually paid out at $270 million. And now, as Masters herself notes in the last line of the book's prologue, "Michael Eisner, brilliant and ruthless, rules Disney, and rules alone."

Eisner is a big man in just about every sense of the word, save physical girth. All of the players in Keys to the Kingdom are big men, massive characters with the kind of egos that crush smaller figures on a daily basis. It's gleeful fun to enter into this upper eschelon of Hollywood, to observe the sweeping decisions and huge appetites of these giants. That's the chief appeal of Kingdom, and if you can overlook a few factual missteps on Masters' part, the book offers quite the vicarious thrills.